OT: Designing a Complete Passing System

There's an excerpt from Dan Gonzales' book "Recoded and Reloaded" up at Smart Football. Basically talks about what any passing system (whether West Coast, Air Raid, Run n' Shoot, etc.) needs to do in order to be successful. He has 15 rules in total, and there are lots of examples given of each.

One take away that seems relevant to other topics on this board is that arm strength really only gets mentioned in one of the bullet points, and it is half of that bullet point since they said horizational and vertical. Rather the points mostly focus around adjustments, putting your WR is good posistions, reading the defense and exploiting what you see. Obviousily if your QB has a weak arm, you run into issues with other principles, like avoiding WR overlap since they all have to hang out in a small area. However it seems to read as average BCS level arm strength gets you 14.5 out of 15 points.

Of course this whole article seems somewhat predicated on the idea you want to install a pass first or at least a balanced attack. For a run first time the passing system article likely reads more along "Throw it deep when they load the box and make them pay."

Moving forward though our passing attack will be interesting this year. In theory we have the talent to embrace a run first game, but the talent whose strength is run first is all freshmen and RS freshmen. On the flip side we have an upper classman QB who should some skill at passing last season, but he's behind an unseasoned interior offensive line (which you can mitigate with quick throws) and the WR skill really depends on Funchess and at least one of the taller WRs making strides to supplement the Gallon/Dileo slot ninjas.

I actually have Gonzalez's first book "Concept Passing", and the impression I get here is that this is the expansion of what he laid out in his initial work. I do like the idea that the concepts can be incorporated fairly easily into a core system, which is in line with his emphasis on what he called a "diverse but learnable" offense. The overarching theme in the first book is simply adapting to increasingly varied coverage schemes, and it seems like this new offering expands on something he started in the first book, which to me seemed like the creation of a hybrid passing offense that drew from all the major "systems".